IT Infrastructure Architecture Blog

Sjaak Laan's vision on infrastructure architecture

Monitoring by system administrators

At a customer I work for HP Openview is used as a monitoring tool for their IT infrastructure. Openview is a very powerful tool with much functionality.

When a monitoring tool is installed, it contains little functionality. The specific functionality for the business and/or IT environment is to be implemented after the initial installation of the tool.

Such an implementation is a complex matter. Not only for Openview, but also for other monitoring tools, like Tivoli,BMC or Nagios. For a list of monitorin tools,check out this link.

Added value

My experience is that when system administrators see no added value in monitoring applications, the monitoring will not be used. If the admins see the added value of the product, they will embrace it.

For instance: When many alarms are generated by the monitoring system, but most of these alarms are false, or when one gets too little information from the system, the monitoring system will be experienced as unsuitable.

On the other hand, if system administrators experience that the system generates a relevant alarm, which will prevent the users from calling the helpdesk, the system will be found useful and will be used. An example is when the system informs the admins a disk is filling up. If the information is early, the administrators can increase diskspace before anything bad happens.

Improvements

It is important to keep the monitoring tool up-to-date. When incidents happen that were not noticed by the monitoring system, the monitoring system should be improved. The next time such an incident is about to happen, the monitoring tool alarms the system admins before things go wrong. This means that every time an incident happens, the administrators should consider implementing extra checks of thresholds in the monitoring system.

It should be easy to implement such improvements. When changes can be made easily, the monitoring system gets more and more pro-active.